Daimler And Bosch Choose San Jose For Their Silicon Valley Robo-Taxi Service

Transportation
A lifetime in the car business, first engineering, now communicating

Automated Mercedes-Benz S-Class prototype. Daimler and Bosch will launch an automated ride-hailing pilot in San Jose, CA in the second half of 2019Bosch

Daimler and Bosch said in July that would launch their first automated ride-hailing pilot program somewhere in Silicon Valley in 2019. That somewhere has now been identified as San Jose where a small fleet of automated S-Class sedans will start carrying passengers in the second half of next year.

The two Stuttgart-based companies have been collaborators since the very earliest days of the auto industry. Over the past forty years, they have frequently partnered up to launch new active safety technologies including anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control and adaptive cruise control. In April 2017, it was no surprise that they announced a collaboration to develop highly automated driving systems for urban mobility.

The automaker and the world’s largest automotive supplier have had development efforts going on at two main locations, Sunnyvale, California where they each have R&D facilities and of course Stuttgart, Germany where both are headquartered. Bosch is also doing additional development work at its Plymouth, Michigan technical center.

Combined teams of engineers are developing the software and sensing packages for the automated driving systems. Daimler is handling vehicle integration while Bosch is producing the compute platform that will be used. For this highly automated system, the computer is based on the Nvidia Pegasus architecture, the most powerful such system yet announced with claimed performance of 320 trillion operations per second. Bosch is augmenting the four main Nvidia processors on Pegasus with added micro-controllers and processors including a system-on-a-chip of its own design to provide additional redundancy.

Automated Mercedes-Benz S-Class prototype. Daimler and Bosch will launch an automated ride-hailing pilot in San Jose, CA in the second half of 2019Bosch

The first fruits of that collaborative effort will hit the streets of San Jose next year. The Mercedes-Benz S-class sedans will feature more than 40 sensors including lidar, radar, cameras and ultrasonic sensors.

Daimler Mobility Services is developing the ride-hailing app that will also be connected into other services such as the Car2go carsharing system and Moovel multi-modal platform. The region between San Jose and Santa Clara at the south end of San Francisco Bay and San Francisco itself at the north end of the peninsula has become increasingly congested over the past several decades as the tech industry has exploded.

San Jose has over one million residents, a number expected to grow another 40 percent in the next 20 years. Reducing the number of individually owned vehicles on the roads of the area will be crucial to maintaining something resembling a livable environment. Automated mobility services in combination with mass transit and micro-mobility are increasingly seen as the best path forward.

Waymo is planning to launch its commercial services in the Phoenix area before the end of this year and expand into California in 2019 while GM, Zoox and others are also expected to debut services in the area by 2020. In addition to operating its own services, Daimler also struck a deal with Uber in early 2017 that would enable the German company to deploy its automated vehicles on the largest ride-hailing platform when they are ready.

I’ve spent my entire adult life working in and around the automotive industry. After earning a mechanical engineering degree from GMI I spent the next 17 years working on electronic control systems that help cars stop, go and change direction before I drove away to write ab...